I'm personally much more excited about Udoo ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/435 ... ngle-board ) as it's got both full Arduino-compatibility and enough grunt to run even quite demanding Linux-applications, lots of connectivity and it still doesn't cost *that* much more than this. Alas, perhaps this BeagleBone is more suitable for highly specialized workloads.

Damn, you couldn't have waited a couple days before posting this article? The thing won't even officially be available until tomorrow, which is presumably why Newark is showing zero availability just yet.

WereCatf's UDOO quad has sata support. Of course that'll set you back 3 BeagleBones, but it's definitely a nice feature.

That's exactly one of the reasons why I'm so interested in it. A small SSD or similar attached via the SATA - port and a powerful 4-core SoC with Arduino handling input of all kinds of sensory data -- the possibilities are numerous.

WereCatf's UDOO quad has sata support. Of course that'll set you back 3 BeagleBones, but it's definitely a nice feature.

That's exactly one of the reasons why I'm so interested in it. A small SSD or similar attached via the SATA - port and a powerful 4-core SoC with Arduino handling input of all kinds of sensory data -- the possibilities are numerous.

You would think these would start coming with more on-board storage. I wouldn't take up much space to include a 32 or 64 GB SSD chip. However, given that these mini computers are often made for a multitude of reasons, perhaps this wouldn't be a selling point for the intended audience. The problem with a SATA drive would be power, and right now these computers don't exactly support robust PSUs.

WereCatf's UDOO quad has sata support. Of course that'll set you back 3 BeagleBones, but it's definitely a nice feature.

That's exactly one of the reasons why I'm so interested in it. A small SSD or similar attached via the SATA - port and a powerful 4-core SoC with Arduino handling input of all kinds of sensory data -- the possibilities are numerous.

Unless you need really high data rates an external USB drive should work great. You will probably need a powered drive or hub though.

You would think these would start coming with more on-board storage. I wouldn't take up much space to include a 32 or 64 GB SSD chip. However, given that these mini computers are often made for a multitude of reasons, perhaps this wouldn't be a selling point for the intended audience. The problem with a SATA drive would be power, and right now these computers don't exactly support robust PSUs.

Soldering so much storage on the thing would increase the cost. Not much, but still. Also, it would make it much harder to replace the storage if it ever wore out. The whole idea with making storage and such removeable is customizability to your specific workload.

Also, I don't see the problem with SATA-drive power requirements. The maximum load would be 12V * 3 pins rated at 1.5A. That's perfectly doable without requiring "robust PSUs."

Unless you need really high data rates an external USB drive should work great. You will probably need a powered drive or hub though.

My Pandaboard can power a 2.5" laptop HDD just fine over USB even without a powered USB-hub. The problem is the poor performance of the USB2.0 - subsystem, what with slow speeds and high tax on the CPU.

Of course, I'm not saying most people looking for these kinds of boards would have any use for a SATA-port. But still, we do exist, a niche inside a niche

Soldering so much storage on the thing would increase the cost. Not much, but still. Also, it would make it much harder to replace the storage if it ever wore out. The whole idea with making storage and such removeable is customizability to your specific workload.

That's true, I didn't consider replace-ability as an issue. I guess I'm not the target consumer for one of these computers, although I do think they are awesome!

I'm personally much more excited about Udoo ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/435 ... ngle-board ) as it's got both full Arduino-compatibility and enough grunt to run even quite demanding Linux-applications, lots of connectivity and it still doesn't cost *that* much more than this. Alas, perhaps this BeagleBone is more suitable for highly specialized workloads.

I totally understand what they mean, but there's no such thing as full Arduino-compatiblity - the UDOO is compatible with an Arduino DUE, which is mostly compatible with AVR-based Arduino Mega and like devices.

I totally understand what they mean, but there's no such thing as full Arduino-compatiblity - the UDOO is compatible with an Arduino DUE, which is mostly compatible with AVR-based Arduino Mega and like devices.

Well, okay, I should have been more precise about how I word the thing. My apologies.

WereCatf's UDOO quad has sata support. Of course that'll set you back 3 BeagleBones, but it's definitely a nice feature.

That's exactly one of the reasons why I'm so interested in it. A small SSD or similar attached via the SATA - port and a powerful 4-core SoC with Arduino handling input of all kinds of sensory data -- the possibilities are numerous.

Unless you need really high data rates an external USB drive should work great. You will probably need a powered drive or hub though.

The problem is USB hubs are notoriously unreliable. Just check out Newegg customer feedback if you don't believe me.

I've have the Beagleboard XM. It has a 4 USB ports, but there is a cavaet. The USB hub chip has a bug that requires a kernel patch that not every distribution has added. Also, the ethernet isn't native, but rather is piped through the 5th USB port on the board. Not really great architecture. So the short story is what you really want is a reduced cost and improved Beagleboard XM.

As a former CMU'er, I promise you the UDOO will become a device of inhumane torture for CS/EE/ECE students. For the rest of us, this is going to be freekin' awesome, though $100+ is starting to get a little pricey.

"They have these really simple functions. If I want to set a pin high, it's digital right, pin number and high. If you want to set a pulse-width modulator, it's analog right and the frequency that you want to write at, what the duty cycle is."

After spending a few minutes trying to parse this sentence, I think you got bit by a homophone. (Should be "write".)

The great thing about the Cortex-A8 (Beaglebone) architecture compared to the ARMv6 (RaspberryPi) is that the A8 NEON floating point unit performs far better and has far better compiler support than the ARMv6 VFP unit.

"They have these really simple functions. If I want to set a pin high, it's digital right, pin number and high. If you want to set a pulse-width modulator, it's analog right and the frequency that you want to write at, what the duty cycle is."

After spending a few minutes trying to parse this sentence, I think you got bit by a homophone. (Should be "write".)

The great thing about the Cortex-A8 (Beaglebone) architecture compared to the ARMv6 (RaspberryPi) is that the A8 NEON floating point unit performs far better and has far better compiler support than the ARMv6 VFP unit.

The RPi (ARM11 family and ARMv6 architecture in ARM's wonderfully clear and intuitive naming scheme) doesn't even have hardware integer division. The A8 does, and it's also a superscalar architecture that can nearly double the number of instructions executed each clock cycle. The A8 gets considerably better performance per MHz.

As an old dude that grew up a regular at the local Radio Shack and Heathkit stores, I think this is freaking awesome. The evolution is pretty cool.

Back in the early 80's, I built special purpose computers out of TRS-80 Color Computers and Apple II's, typically for industrial use; fluid tank monitors and such. Needless to say, they were huge, crude, primitive beasts.

Stuff like the Beaglebone makes me want to clean off the workbench again and play.

"Programmable Real-time Unit" - basically some dedicated hardware for monitoring the GPIO pins and responding to them much more quickly than you can in some code running on the CPU. I don't know how capable it is as I didn't spend the $90 on a current-gen Bone, but I'm looking forward to seeing how much microcontroller or PLC-style work it can be made to do.

You would think these would start coming with more on-board storage. I wouldn't take up much space to include a 32 or 64 GB SSD chip.

You might be disappointed. SSDs use large number of flash chips and a sophisticated controller to manage the flash, and let you have multiple reads and writes going on in parallel. A simple NAND flash chip on the board won't give SSD performance.

On the other hand, it would be faster than the SD card. But on the gripping hand, you're adding a high speed part and parallel data bus to the board, which takes a lot of space and design work as well as adding a not-insignificant cost to the BOM.

"Programmable Real-time Unit" - basically some dedicated hardware for monitoring the GPIO pins and responding to them much more quickly than you can in some code running on the CPU. I don't know how capable it is as I didn't spend the $90 on a current-gen Bone, but I'm looking forward to seeing how much microcontroller or PLC-style work it can be made to do.

So many people here are complaining about a lack of SATA support and/or on board fast flash storage. I am more interested in being able to net boot one of these types of systems, no SD card necessary. It would certainly require a more complex on-board BIOS-like system (rather than simply "load whatever is on that card in the slot over there").

In fact, why not throw out the SD card slot completely? Save the cost, and improve the built-in networking subsystem. Also, building and booting a whole cluster of these could be made more cheaply without that pesky SD card requirement.

This is an improvement, but we already have a quite nice A8 Cortex with double the ram, and double the flash size for the same price - The CubieBoard - http://www.cubieboard.org

I am a bit biased, I started the http://CubieForums.com site though, and am about 3/4 the way designing our own board based off the Allwinner A10 SoC that powers the Cubieboard for my own nefarious reasons.

Great to see more real competition in the small embedded space though. More choice is good!

For dumb end-users like me, the $50 Android sticks are much better value for money and time spent. I'm surprised there hasn't been an article on those yet, they're the non-DIYer counterpart to the Pi/Beagle...